Present day military-grade signal collection and surveillance equipment is used to capture communications transmissions from enemy radios and/or clandestine sources. A crucial piece of this equipment is the wideband collection system. The wideband collection system can intercept various wireless communications over a large subset of the RF spectrum. The interception of various wireless communications is a critical signal intelligence function that is vital for national security interests. The captured signals and raw data energy enter the analysis and post-processing pipeline, where the actual voice or digital data is extracted. For a networked system of wideband collection boxes with direction finding determination capabilities, the geolocation of the source of the signals is also determined.
Currently, the high end signal collection equipment that is used generates a lot of information; the amount of information exceeds the capabilities of current graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to display the information to the operator. This is a significant problem today. The modern military unit or intelligence organization needs GUI tools to display (intuitively and automatically) the massive amounts of data and computation results that state-of-the-art wideband systems with DF capability generate. The unit or intelligence organization also needs to be much more efficient; the organization needs GUI tools that help filter out extraneous, unwanted signal data automatically. This present requirement is critical since currently there are not enough human resources to analyze all captured signal data properly.
Prior art methods for the display of direction attributes of signal data are archaic, because they are designed for use with systems that employ only narrowband, single channel receivers. The prior art GUI displays are limited in their use and incapable of displaying the range of signal attributes detected by today's wideband collection systems. Among these attributes are frequency, amplitude, and source geolocation. Prior art GUIs also do not help the efficiency of the system operator, by filtering out signals coming from unimportant locations.
Over time, the capabilities of wideband collection systems will grow exponentially. This flood of detected data poses a significant threat to national security since the intelligence information ages quickly, and thus as much of the signal data as possible needs to be understood very quickly. As more and more data is received, modern user interfaces of wideband systems must adapt so as not to overwhelm the user with data. The GUI needs to abstract the data at a high enough level so that the user is protected from the flood of raw information. The raw information is still very important, so while the GUI needs to show a high level of abstraction, the GUI also needs to allow the user to drill down into any specific data of interest. The GUI also needs to offer the operator options to filter out signals. Thus the capability of the GUI must grow exponentially to meet the demands of growing amounts of detected data.
What is needed therefore in order to quickly understand and interact with the many signals detected by modern wideband signal collection systems is a real-time graphical user interface that can handle the display of much information, intuitively and interactively. What is needed is an invention that adds capabilities far beyond prior art systems. What is needed is a GUI display that allows user to isolate incoming signals by their originating location on a map. This must be done in real time. Such a capability will vastly enhance the overall signal collection process capability and efficiency as opposed to prior art methods.